Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/487

450 service to the society, but it remained for her to place the Daughters of the American Revolution before the country as they should be known. She broke down the bulwark of ridicule and sarcasm which greeted every effort, erected by a sensation-loving press of the country. She made it plain to those responsible for giving such news to the world that to bear false witness applied to women organized as well as to women individually, and through courteous and gentle means she showed the injustice with which her society had been treated. In this she performed a service for the society greater in the moral sense than the brilliant management of the business affairs is in a material way.

Very recently she has been elected president of the McLean County Coal Company, of Bloomington, Illinois, to succeed the former vice-president, Adlai Stevenson. The respect and admiration in which she is held by her Illinois neighboring farmers, many of them keen-witted business men, is in itself a tribute which bears testimony to her rating in the realm of great and practical affairs. Her farms yield a golden harvest, but better is the distinction which she has earned as a stimulus to scientific farming and a factor in the future welfare of her environment. One of her many wisely beneficent deeds is to send a certain number of her tenants yearly to the Agricultural College of Illinois to prepare themselves for more productive work.

Mrs. Scott has always taken a keen interest in inland waterways, and she has served on many committees which inquired into that problem which so vitally concerns the future. She has learned by practical experience the excellent results of conserving water. As Father Noah says in that wonderful poem of Jean Ingelow, "With my foot, have I turned the river to water grasses that are fading," she has redeemed a wilderness in the lower counties of Iowa by means of irrigation.